User blog comment:Nblonkenfeld/BENDING THE RULES/@comment-3284350-20140515082001

A few years ago, I scored tickets to see my favourite musician, Jackson Browne, live in concert. It wasn't the sort of shindig that came with the potential for a meet and greet afterwards, because dude... JACKSON BROWNE. But this is a man whose music is basically what my soul would sound like if souls had sounds, so I came up with a hairbrained scheme.

I brought my guitar to the concert and went dressed like... well, like someone you'd expect to see behind the scenes. It's hard to explain what that means... work boots and black canvas bags were involved, minimal accessorizing... I was a person whose job was to take things to places, who had to be able to haul and assemble those things, who spent a lot of time in a truck, so I had to have comfortable, durable clothes but still be able to put on a professional face... The effectiveness of it had a lot to do with attitude.

I got to the venue early and spent a lot of time just kind of wandering around, quietly savoring the feeling of being so close to one of my idols, and practicing looking the part. I think I had around 10 people ask me if I was with the band, so I knew it was effective from the get-go. Keep in mind these were people who were making that assumption of someone who was just hanging around in the seating area and huge grassy hill that constitutes the "cheap seats" at this outdoor venue. I wasn't near the stage at all, much less any of the backstage access doors. The point is, people believed I had business with the crew or talent.

My plan was to con my way into meeting Mr. Browne after the show by pretending to deliver a guitar backstage. I believe it would have worked if I had just walked through the backstage access doors and acted like I knew where I was going. Unfortunately, since the venue was so massive, I wasn't actually sure where I should be acting like I had business going, so instead, after waiting until the bulk of the concertgoers had exited the gates, I approached the first walkie-talkie-carrying person I could find and asked them where to take my delivery.

This first person, who was a little younger than me and probably one of the many student volunteers the place employs during summer months, totally bought my act but didn't think she was supposed to let anyone backstage if she hadn't been told to expect them. So she called another guy over, who also believed I was who I said I was, but also didn't know if they were supposed to let me go where I wanted to go, so they called someone else over, who THOUGHT it was okay but ultimately decided they had better call their supervisor over just to be sure.

The supervisor person who showed up was an impatient, grumpy woman who I suspect had been on her feet shepherding employees and audience members since before I even got out of bed that morning. It didn't matter whether she believed me -- I was just one more problem to be dealt with by this person who had enough shit to take care of already, and she didn't want to deal with me. I think she DID buy my story, but she had no intention of taking responsibility for the whereabouts of an unexpected delivery person or sparing any of her employees/volunteers to drop whatever they were doing and be a guide. She politely but firmly made it clear that I wasn't going to get where I was trying to go through her. So I made some mildly inconvenienced noises about poor communication, grumbled that this happens all the time when they sent me to big places like this, said I'd try to get my boss on the phone to sort it out, thanked her for her trouble, and popped off out of sight.

The story gets less climactic now. I was by no means defeated, but I also knew better than to get caught by any of the same 4 employees trying to get past a 5th. So I abandoned the idea of getting permission and went exploring, my new plan being to simply find the back entrances and stake out the tour busses or the doors or... something. Possibly to hide until I actually saw any musicians appear and try to approach them without having to deal with any crew or venue employees at all.

The problem was that this place is HUGE. The venue was an open-air stage that had a great deal of stadium-style seating under a roof with no walls, and room for probably twice that number of people on the sloping lawn surrounding the place. It isn't a single building with obvious access points to any part of it -- the main stage is set into a heavily wooded area, and the network of parking lots, walls, hedges, concession stands, restaurants, restrooms, and roads is extensive and poorly marked. I couldn't just follow a wall or a street around back of the place. I had to take a wild guess where I thought I might find a back entrance or tour bus parking, then go hiking through hilly woods and wooded hills in the dark and hope I didn't fall into a creek or get bitten by a snake or eaten by mosquitos.

I did figure out where the busses were. I managed to get to a spot about 20 feet from a far edge of the correct back parking lot, where I parked myself under the cover of some small trees, shaded from the floodlights but with a clear view of the load out.

In the end, what stopped me was a simple attack of pussing out. I may be a good liar and a fine actor, but by this point, I had been there for 6 or 7 hours, in-character the whole time, dancing around a shoddily-constructed premise while enthusiastically chatting up more strangers in one night than I normally speak to in three months. I had been lugging around a guitar and an over-packed backpack and small duffel bag in the muggy heat of summer in Virginia. I had danced to every song that was played. And it was a FANTASTIC night.

I stood in the dark under those trees watching from afar as a steady parade of roadies hauled stuff out and packed it up to be transported to the next stop on the tour. I stayed there and just looked, sort of thinking about how and when to try approaching them but no longer really all that motivated, until the doors were locked and the busses pulled out of the lot and on towards the highway. Only then did I make my way back up the long hill, through the scattered woods, over the low mostly-decorative wooden fence to the sprawling flattish field that was one of the unpaved parking areas surrounding the place. Back to the only vehicle left standing there in the darkness lit only by the clear night sky.

I hadn't succeeded in meeting Jackson Browne, but I left with no regrets or bad decisions, and the next time I try the instrument delivery scheme, I'll be sure to come with fake business cards, a few names of real people who might have done something like ask to have an instrument delivered to a concert venue, and an accomplice willing to pretend to be my boss over the phone. Not that anyone ever asked who I was or who authorized me to be there. But they would have been nice touches.